I would like to see a complement to the pdftops and other pdfto* utilities that can output to pdf. I'd like to see options like -embedfonts (which would embed all non-embedded fonts in the output), -paper (for changing paper size) along with -expand and -nocrop, -createopw/-createupw (for creating user/owner passwords for the output). I'm sure there are many other useful options that could be added.
ghostscript provides a tool which can do some of this called pdf2pdf. Unfortunately, its pdf interpreter doesn't appear to be as correct as poppler's and the resulting pdf that ghostscript generates doesn't look that great. So, to properly embed fonts in an existing PDF (which is at times necessary for various publications), I've found I can only get acceptable output by using poppler's pdftops utility and then using ghostscript's ps2pdf utility with -dPDFSETTINGS=/prepress (or -dPDFSETTINGS=/printer) to embed even the standard postscript fonts.
I'd prefer just to be able to use a single poppler tool to get the job done.

It would also be useful if it had an option to write the PDF streams out in the uncompressed format to aid in debugging of flaky PDFs. It's a little easier to figure out what is going on when you have a plaintext PDF rather than one with Flate-encoded streams.

CUPS filters contain pdftopdf tool with this functionality (see <http://en.sourceforge.jp/projects/opfc/scm/svn/tree/head/pdftopdf/>).
I would like to see another option to strip (or add) the user/owner password protection. I sometimes get password-protected PDF files and for archiving purposes, it's easier to strip the protection (and then encrypt with my PGP key ).

(In reply to comment #4)
> I would like to see another option to strip (or add) the user/owner password
> protection. I sometimes get password-protected PDF files and for archiving
> purposes, it's easier to strip the protection (and then encrypt with my PGP
> key ).
This has been asked as bug #18440.